Twitter rate limit check and caching

Question

I want to check if there's an issue with how I'm checking API request limit for twitter results. Even with the approach below, I still get the occasional error where I have no tweets to display. The caching part works fine, I'm just not sure if i'm going the right way about checking the rate limit status? Thanks

            // Check allowed requests left from server IP - get json response and decode to array
        $curr_rate = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/account/rate_limit_status.json", TRUE)); 

        // Check remaining hits allowed
        if ($curr_rate AND $curr_rate->remaining_hits > 10)
        {   
            $twitter_data = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/userID.json?count=3", TRUE));

            // Cache twitter feed to avoid rate limit issue
            $this->cache->set('tweets', $twitter_data);
        }   
        else
        {
            // Don't make another request, use cached tweets
            $twitter_data = $this->cache->get('tweets');
        }

Answer 1

Your checks are fine.

However, when I hit

http://api.twitter.com/1/account/rate_limit_status.json

100 times, there are still same numbers appearing